I couldn’t get off my mind, that morning when I was six years old, when my mother asked me to bury a dead animal. I held the carcass of a dead new-born pig, quiet inside the plastic bag. Its cold fleshy body was wrapped with its placenta, reeked of a metallic smell from both urine and blood. It was left unattended when its mother labored the whole night – we were exhausted from waiting, it came out dead. I got a small shovel and dug two-feet deep at the back of our house. I threw in the dead animal, covered it with moist soil and got a rock from the stonewall, the biggest rock I could carry, to place it on top – as if to stop the animal soul from getting out.
I thought it was normal to dig around our house whenever there was a dead animal from our pigpen, and I believed dead animals were always buried that way – during early morning when the soil was damp, when the last shadows of the night still hovered above me in secrecy. But when the sun was up, I thought it was normal for dogs to roam around our house, sniffing the earth because they could smell the decaying animal. I threw them rocks so they would run away, but when I closed my eyes and napped a bit, they quickly dug deep and pulled the old plastic out and the bones would scatter. I would wake up from the sound of their pleasure of finding their dead meat, I ran after them and kicked them out they wouldn’t show their nose for a week. I shoved the bones with my feet and stand on it, feeling guilty as if the sun was judging me with its overwhelming light.
Sometimes, I got irritated when there were bones still jutting out in the soil, and I remember it had only been a year since I dug the area. Anyway, to hide the dead, one should bury it, worms would eat the flesh. It would smell for a time but the bones would thin into moisture, break down slowly and become no more. The soil would turn black and green grass would start to grow.
We were literally walking on top of dead bones in our backyard. What I liked the most was when summer came, it became very warm, the earth would dry up and turn into dusty orange. I felt at peace momentarily, knowing that the ground was packed tightly. At night, I didn’t hear the whimpering sounds of the animals.
When the first rain of June came, the thirsty ground was watered and formed a mist from its heat, the souls of the animals would evaporate, which I watched from the window of my room. The next day, slimy slugs would creep into my door steps, their path had a silvery paste from their jelly bellies. I considered them the souls of the buried animals, who were impure or had a bad character, so they revolted but turned to ugly slugs. The slugs would be around for few days but died of too much moisture and soon disappeared without a trace.
I would spend the rainy season helping my Mom in our outside kitchen, just near the pigpen, kindling fire and boiling the meal of our growing pigs. We collected from the food scraps of our neighborhood and recycled them as pig food. You see, fire warms the pigs during rains, they gobbled their still hot meal, unmindful of scalding their tongues. I watched them fatten for a few weeks. But in a few months, their mouth began to foam and their cries became louder, the vagina of the female pigs would swell and turn red. We knew they were waiting for something to warm them up. We called a vet, a drop-out turned supplier, and after some smelling and rubbing, he would inseminate the sperm to the mother pig and that’s when our pig got pregnant, some of its babies survived, others died.
When the cold months came, the nights became longer, and the wind blew from the nearby pine forest. I would then trim the grass in our backyard. Just as the soil dried, it would grow its pearly teeth in the form of scattered pretty white shells of dead snails. I collected the empty ones and lined them up in my bedroom window. If bored, I would stare at the circles of fragile shells and touch the lid of their smooth mouth. I watched the lined-up shells for so long, nothing moved. Sometimes, I wondered if they were made from the bones of the dead animals I buried.
During the -Ber months, we entertained ourselves at home with stories. My Mom shared one story I couldn’t forget. There was a neighbor whose pig got sick. The animal was nearing adulthood and ready to be sold. But the animal was too sick to move, too numb to feel anything at night. The wicked rats came and ate its flesh from the feet to its snout. When the owner saw the skinned feet and exposed mouth of the pig, he screamed, and the neighbors came. The men dug a big hole near the pine forest and buried the pig alive. I just turned another year that time, but I thought of the story as normal, I told it to my playmates and we searched for the buried place in the forest.
We began to notice fruits among the trees we climbed. We gathered sticks for our campfire. Once, I was late joining my playmates because I helped feed the pigs. I went to the forest and saw them gathering near the area where the garbage was piled and burned during weekends. What is that? No one looked back. I entered their circle and saw in a pile of discarded things, their object of awe, a cigarette box holder made of paper about the length of a ruler, there is a fleshy and bony animal lying on it! Its small and thin, a tiny human being with bones and flesh, fingers and feet. Its eyes bulged under the skin, thin quiet lips. The image haunted me for a long time. Down to its fragile ribs, the belly button was connected to an umbilical cord, wrapped hurriedly with a small white tape. We freaked out of fear not because of the terrible look of an underdeveloped human being, but because when its shallow breast heaved its last breath, a tear came out from its closed eyes. We were terrified because we felt the forest move. My playmates ran, not comprehending what they saw, when I asked them the next day, they didn’t remember, when I asked them again, they didn’t know anythng.
I stayed in the forest that day. I dug a two-feet deep rectangular hole and measured the length, one that fits a paper coffin smeared with blood, a quiet animal lies within, naked and cold.
He was a male figure like it was of soft red clay. It was a baby human, prettily dressed. I couldn’t cover the face. The longer I stared at the baby, the more I became afraid because the soul had long departed from it, and I was staring at an angry doll that slowly turned into a cavernous shell, whimpering in the cold, with its skin covered with the black leather of hundreds of slugs! I mustered my remaining sanity and reached for the earth and threw it at the slugs. How many times had I buried animals in the past? I heard the crushing of a tender body when it was pressed by the soil on which I climbed. It wasn’t morning that time, but it felt like the sun was rising because the forest trees covered me from the judgement of the wide blue sky.
